Wednesday, November 26, 2014

There is No Justice in the Capitalist Courts! The Working Class Must Never Forget Michael Brown! Organize Labor, Black and Brown Struggle!

The majority white Ferguson Grand Jury in refusing to indict Darren Wilson is has whitewashed the summary execution of Michael Brown. This outrage will embolden every racist cop in the United States to continue their terror against the black, brown and immigrant communities. The cops know that all they require is a complaint for ‘sufficient’ cause to kill a black person; that their weight with the justice system is so great that they can routinely commit legal lynching and walk away free.

The Ferguson Grand Jury was a “Star Chamber” of the most objectionable type, with the proceedings dragging on for months, with a majority white jury that was not sequestered during the media hype and a prosecutor who made certain there would be no indictment. New York State Chief Judge Sol Wachter once remarked that a prosecutor could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”

In cases of police killings, indictments are extremely rare. The Brown family will likely not even find any compensation in a civil court for the death of their loved one, as the media hype will have tainted every jury pool. The report of the Grand Jury was nevertheless a freak report. In 2010, in 162,000 Grand Jury cases in the U.S., only 11 failed to bring indictments. That's .0000679, i.e., 6.79 times per 100,000 cases. This fact has to be known by Obama, legal scholar and leader of the Democrats. The Democrats have no fundamental commitment to defense of Black lives or to Mike Brown's good name, but only to the superior bourgeois rights of property.

“It has been reliably established that a black person is killed by cops or vigilantes every 28 hours in the U.S.A. Only the most flagrant abuses of police brutality and terror come to light, while the black, brown and immigrant communities face daily harassment, beatings and murder at the hands of the racist cops."

Darren Wilson will either be reinstated to full duty and pay to be able to freely conduct racist gunplay in Ferguson and the St. Louis area, or he will broker his resignation and leave with a nice pile of money. Meanwhile, the protesters demanding justice will be facing massive state repression at the hands of the militarized police forces, the FBI, the fascist KKK and the National Guard.

It is only the organized self-defense of the masses based on a political program of struggle that can curb the excesses of an increasingly Bonapartist police state. There will be ever-increasing racist gunplay and there will be many more Michael Browns until the masses start to organize Labor, Black and Brown community self-defense militias and carry out labor-centered actions to counter the racist violence through political labor strikes. “They shoot us down, we shut them down!” A fighting, multi-racial labor movement would have launched a general strike in reaction to Michael Brown’s murder.

We in the Communist Workers Group are not alone in calling for these self-defense organizations, but these run headlong into the resistance of a trade union bureaucracy that has anchored its fortunes in the capitalist Democratic Party and who are happy to collect the dues of the Police Benevolent Associations, telling us that the killers in blue are union sisters and brothers! So our first task is to drive the police out of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win labor federations. The police are not workers. They are the hired guns of Capital.

No more Fergusons! Right now, the frequency of police killings is increasing and is at epidemic levels, with more Americans killed by cops in the last decade than have been killed in Iraq. In order to reverse this trend, the social vanguard of the labor movement, the black, brown and immigrant communities need to take to heart the historic lesson of the Deacons for Defense and Social Justice, the best days of the Black Panther Party, Robert F. Williams and the Minneapolis Teamsters Union Defense Guard.

The pacifists have led you into blind alleys and into T streets for the police to ambush you, while politically disarming the masses with impotent attempts to ‘reform the police.’ We will remember the advice of Malcolm X who said “We’ll be non-violent with those who are non-violent with us.” Until such time as racists fear for their lives and well-being, they will feel entitled to act out their perceived white-skin privilege with deadly force and none of the behavior of the bourgeois state will give them any reason to believe otherwise.

An injury to one is an injury to all!

Defend Ferguson protesters!

Drop all charges and for the immediate release of all Ferguson protesters!

For organized trade union contingents to Ferguson to demand justice for Michael Brown!

National Guard out of Ferguson! Down with the militarization of the police!

No stop and frisk! Defeat racial profiling! Down with La Migra and police attacks on immigrants!

For immediate full citizenship rights for all immigrants!

No faith in the bosses’ courts!

We need our own institutions to gain justice!

Turn the meetings and mobilizations into organizing meetings for Labor, Black and Brown self-defense guards and tribunals!

Form up multi-racial Labor, Black and Brown self-defense guards to defend against racist police, KKK and vigilante terror!

For workers’ tribunals to bring murdering racist cops and vigilantes to justice!

Build Labor, Black and Brown political strike actions to bring these criminals to justice!

Friday, November 21, 2014

John Key, NZ Prime Minister presenting Xi Jinping, China's President, with a No 8 All Black jersey to seal the 'win-win' strategic partnership.

Xi Jinping’s 2-day stopover in NZ was a success. It sealed a ‘strategic partnership’ upgrading the 2008 FTA (Free Trade Agreement) with China to match Australia’s recent FTA. It’s all about NZ as supplier of cheap food plus high tech inputs into China’s rampaging economy.

This upgraded FTA access will be exploited by the US when it succeeds in forcing NZ to sign up to the TPPA (Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement). US investors will have open access to grab control of strategic NZ IP assets and piggy back into China on the basis of the ‘win-win’ partnership. So NZ is no more than a stalking horse for US entry into China.

The US has made clear from the outset that it must compete with China by penetrating its domestic economy. China developed rapidly by welcoming Western FDI but on its own terms.
To date the US, Japan and EU have been only able to buy into China as
joint ventures. The profits from these ventures have not been enough to
rescue the US, Japan and EU countries from economic stagnation. China
has been able to quarantine its powerful value producing economy from a
Western takeover.

The rivalry between the TPPA and the APFTA (Asia-Pacific Free Trade Area) is really about getting access to more value produced in China. Yet APEC was a victory for China in promoting the APFTA while the TPPA was stalled over US and Japan Agricultural trade protection. That is the meaning of the symbolic bi-lateral deal between Xi Jinping and Obama signed at APEC over climate change and mutual exchanges designed to divert attention from great-power rivalry.

Despite it's setback, the US strategy is to open up China to FDI access on the same terms as the TPPA. That is, US corporations dictating the terms and not China. So the next move by the US-led bloc is to increase ownership of China’s high tech value-added domestic production as the life-line it needs to survive the impending global recession.

In this power play, NZ is no more than a client state of both major players. Not only does NZ provide a back-door into China. All parliamentary parties join the chorus preaching US objections to China’s failure to live up to 'Western' human rights and the rule of law, as barriers to open access of the global free market.

So this is no 'win-win' for NZ. It is a pawn in this zero-sum heavyweight bout between the US and China imperialist blocs. The way ahead for NZ workers is to fight both imperialist blocs by joining forces with the workers in both China and the US, and the client capitalists in NZ, to overthrow their ruling classes and unite to build a socialist world.

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red rave is the loud mouth of members of the Communist Workers' Group of Aotearoa/New Zealand, committed to building a new communist international to lead workers to the revolutionary overthrow of global capitalism. Since 2010 we have been in a Liaison Committee with the Communist Workers' Group (USA), the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Zimbabwe) and the Revolutionary Workers' Group (Brazil).